Between tortured bodies and resurfacing bones: the politics of the dead in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Bones occupy a complex place in Zimbabwe’s postcolonial milieu. From ancestral bones rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead or the troubling remains of gukurahundi victims, it is clear that bones are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. As both extensions of the dead (spirit ‘subjects’ making demands on the living) and as unconscious ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (retorting to and provoking responses from the living), bones in Zimbabwe not only challenge normalizing processes of state commemoration and heritage, but also animate a myriad of personal, kin, clan, class and political loyalties and struggles. Recent political violence indicates that it is not only dry bones but also the fleshy materiality of tortured bodies that are entangled in Zimbabwe’s troubled postcolonial milieu. Therefore, the author seeks to explore and contrast the complexity of agencies entangled in the affective presence and emotive materiality of both bones and bodies in Zimbabwe. If bodies inscribed with torturous performances of sovereignty do have substantial, if duplicitous, political affects, how does this contrast with the unsettling presence of the longer dead? What does the passage of time — both the material and leaky decomposition of flesh, but equally the transformative processes of burial — do to the affective presence and emotive materiality of the dead? How do broken bodies become bones?

‘It was maendeleo that removed them’: disturbing burials and reciprocal knowledge production in a context of collaborative archaeology

“…Thus, as in other contexts (e.g. Fontein ; Fontein & Harries ; Novak ; O'Dell ; Williams ), the skeletal remains exposed on Naakedi, the cairns beneath which they lay and within which they were once contained, and the physical and social landscapes in which the cairns and their actual and imagined contents were situated were all enmeshed within overlapping webs of meaning and contemporary necropolitics of memory and identity…”

After Ethics

“…In myriad local contexts, struggles and debates around the repatriation and restitution of human remains have been at the sharp edge of a set of broadly ethical concerns in archaeology and related disciplines. These have focused attention on questions of rights, accountabilities and access in relation to disciplinary practitioners, descendent and affected communities and the dead themselves (Fforde et al 2002 ;Fontein 2010 ;Garza 2001 ;Harries 2010 ;Krmpotich et al 2010 ;Legassick and Rassool 1999 ;Verdery 1999 ). They have also delineated some of the lines of tension between disciplinary guiding ideas and forms of practice, and rival knowledge regimes and regimes of care.…”

“…Her remains were repatriated, and on 9 August 2002-National Women's Day in South Africa-reburied on Vergaderingskop, a hill outside the town of Hankey in the Eastern Cape (Crais and Scully 2009 ). Myriad other cases involve Nama community claimants, the forensic recovery and reburial of victims of southern Africa's liberation wars of the post-1960 period, and Khoisan ethnic revivalists (Fontein 2010 ;Hall 2006 ;Harries 2010 ;Krmpotich et al 2010 ;Werbner 1998 ).…”

The Dead in the Land: Encounters with Bodies, Bones, and Ghosts in Northwestern Cambodia

“…As Joost Fontein (2010) has demonstrated, the materiality of bones is often intertwined with their affective qualities. In Reaksmei Songha, this affective presence most often manifested itself as sightings of the grievous ghosts of the dead.…”

“…In a series of seminars and articles, these theorists have convincingly argued that the impact and effect of human bones upon living persons is "not confined to questions about the representation of the past, or indeed their 'symbolic efficacy' … but also has something to do with their 'emotive materiality' as human substances and their 'affective presence' as dead persons" (Fontein 2010, 431;see also Filippucci 2004;Filippucci et al 2012;Fontein 2011;Hallam 2010;Harries 2010). This article will explore the relevance of these categories of emotive materiality and affective presence for the human remains encountered in Reaksmei Songha.…”